Last night as I drifted off to sleep while attempting to finally watch the first season of “Heroes,” the blogosphere exploded with rumors that the search behemoth we call Google may be in talks to acquire Twitter, the not-so-little social application that could. I found this interesting since, according to PCWorld, just last month Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Twitter was a “poor man’s e-mail system.”

But it turns out that among Twitter’s capabilities is one feature that falls right into Google’s ballpark: real-time searches. If you’ve ever used the Twitter search function, you know that you can get an instant snapshot on the popularity of a term just by seeing how many people have sent tweets about it recently. Many Twitter users are incorporating hash tags to help make searches more relevant. A hash tag is simply a # in front of the relevant term. For example, #CES could be used for the Consumer Electronics Show.